Session summary
This GeoField 2026 practice session focuses on the operational and ethical foundations needed for credible, comparable, and responsible geospatial impact evaluation. The presentations examine project location data, treatment geometry, and ethical risk management across the GIE lifecycle.
Moderator: Sara Sayedi
A New IATI-Based Location Standard for Better Data and Impact
Oliver Mundy and Maja Bott present a proposed location-data standard designed to improve how development actors document where projects, activities, assets, and interventions take place. Building on the International Aid Transparency Initiative standard, the presentation explains why reliable project location data are essential for impact evaluation, monitoring, auditing, safeguards, procurement, and operational planning. The proposed approach would better capture points, lines, polygons, exact and approximate locations, activity status, location types, and links between geographic locations and project activities.
Design Choices and Resources for EO–Socioeconomic Data Integration
Elinor Benami and Jeff Michler present practical guidance on integrating Earth observation and socioeconomic data, with a focus on treatment geometry. The presentation explains how spatial choices—such as buffers, boundaries, lines, polygons, distance measures, timing windows, dose-response measures, and treatment assignment rules—shape the causal question a study can answer. The chapter encourages researchers to document and stress test these assumptions, especially when working with spillovers, displaced coordinates, sparse data, crop calendars, and spatially complex interventions.
Ethical Considerations for Geospatial Impact Evaluation
Rubayi Estes presents the Geospatial Ethics and Social Accountability Tool, a self-assessment rubric for identifying and mitigating ethical risks in geospatial impact evaluation. The presentation addresses consent, representation, reidentification, surveillance, dual-use risk, community veto, responsible dissemination, and benefit sharing. Drawing on examples from refugee settlement mapping, counter-mapping, public participation GIS, and critical remote sensing, the tool encourages researchers to treat ethics as an ongoing process across project design, data collection, analysis, visualization, and dissemination.
Together, the session argues that stronger geospatial impact evaluation depends on more than better data or models. It requires reliable location standards, transparent treatment assignment, careful attention to spatial uncertainty, and ethical review that begins before data are collected, analyzed, or shared.